An interesting facet of this age of Disney live-action remakes is how the style and tone of these updates to children’s classics, reimagined decades later, can personify exactly how the sensibilities of mass entertainment have shifted since. From the opening moments of “Lilo & Stitch,” which mostly mirrors the content of its 2002 animated predecessor, the difference is clear: more speed, more noise and more hand-holding for the audience.
To be fair, that is all particularly enhanced by a movie whose entire engine (and marketing) is fueled by a critter that wreaks mayhem and destruction at every turn. Here, things move at warp speed, even as the movie constantly trips over itself trying to pluck at the next heart string. But there’s just enough to make for a moderately fun, mostly serviceable and often adorable revamp that will probably satisfy fans of the original.
Save for a couple characters added and subtracted, along with an amped-up climax, this update, directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, is largely faithful to the original, tracking the bond between Lilo (Maia Kealoha), an orphaned girl being raised by her older sister, Nani (Sydney Agudong), and Stitch (a returning Chris Sanders, who was one of the directors of the 2002 film), an incorrigible alien lab experiment that crash-lands in the jungles of Hawaii.
On the run from the United Galactic Federation, Stitch poses as a dog and goes home with Lilo and Nani, using them as human shields against Jumba (Zach Galifianakis) and Pleakley (Billy Magnussen), two aliens tasked with capturing Stitch. As Nani struggles to raise her sister on her own and tries to prevent child services from taking Lilo away, Stitch only adds to the chaos. But for Lilo, a desperately lonely girl still grieving the loss of her parents, Stitch quickly becomes “ohana,” i.e. family, i.e. “nobody gets left behind.”
This early aughts romp didn’t seem like an obvious candidate for Disney’s ongoing live-action redo campaign, other than the opportunity it presented to let such a memorable (and moneymaking) creature loose in the real world; the studio giant’s other remakes have been partly justified by either recreating vast and fantastical universes (“The Little Mermaid,” “The Lion King”) or dusting off classic storybook properties for a new century (“Dumbo,” “Pinocchio”). In this case, the unique visual splendor of the original — rendering Hawaiian landscapes in a gorgeous and idiosyncratic watercolor animation — is replaced by the easy blandness of a Disney Channel movie.
The largest deviation is depicting Jumba and Pleakley as primarily disguised in human form, morphing early on from the alien entities that they’re seen as in the original. It feels like a business maneuver made to allow the film’s biggest star, Galifianakis, to be onscreen. He is, in turn, relegated to one half of the Disney trope of two bumbling villain stooges.
But what the film does get right, and what matters the most, is its titular partners in crime. As bizarre as it is to say about a little girl and a computer-generated creature revived from hand-drawn animation, Kealoha and Stitch have the endearing chemistry and the real sense of heart that is needed to make this whole thing work. Most of all, together they are very, very cute.
That’s no small or guaranteed feat (see: the “Sonic” live-action debacle), but it’s something you’d expect from Camp, who was responsible for the endlessly heartwarming creature in the 2022 charmer “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.” Yet, curiously, the kind of visceral, deeply human emotional wallop that made “Marcel” so powerful is what is most glaringly lacking in Camp’s “Lilo & Stitch.”
What anchored the original and made for such an uncommonly grounded story for Disney was the moving and desperate reality of two sisters struggling to hold onto each another in the wake of devastating loss. This time, that same story is more constructed than meaningfully felt. The film struggles to let scenes breathe, bludgeons us too frequently with music cues and skips out on crucial emotional beats to replace them with less effective melodrama.
But those who came for the Lilo and Stitch they’ve known and loved will largely get exactly that. Fans will laugh and cry the way they did with the original, even if some of the best parts of the family got left behind.
Lilo & Stitch
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters.
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